Guides & Solutions (Not For Questions)Post your guides here (No links to Blogs accepted). You can also append your comments/questions to a guide, but don't start a new thread to ask a question. Use another forum for that.

After 3 years on Fedora 6, with occasional manual package upgrades, enough things were not working that I decided to switch to Fedora 12 (64-bit, x86_64). Here are solutions to some of the roadblocks I encountered.

1. Recognition of the install DVD

I use an external USB DVD drive (so my box can be silently tucked deep under the desk). My motherboard (ASUS P5B) booted from this fine, but the Fedora installer came up with a "Select Partition" message, asking for the partition that holds the installation image, only allowing me to select from sd[abcd]n, or to press F2 to insert a driver disk in /dev/sr0.

To get past this I had to hit the Back button and choose "local CD/DVD" from the "Installation Method: Type Of Media" menu. I had to do this every time I booted the installation disk.

2. Upgrade or Re-install?

The Fedora installation guides weren't clear about the difference between an upgrade and a re-installation, and what a re-installation entailed. But it was made pretty clear that a simple upgrade of packages would cause trouble between 6 and 12. So I was to do a re-installation.

At first I selected the "Replace existing Linux system" option, so that I could keep my existing partitions. But the installer wouldn't recognise my existing software RAID 1 arrangement.

So I resolved to delete all my partitions and start from scratch. But I couldn't work out how to commit the deletes before creating new ones. The deletions remained uncommitted, so there was no space for new partitions.

So next I tried the "create custom layout" option, setting the mount point '/' for the /dev/md0 software RAID volume. Proceeding with this, it advised against continuing without formatting, So I ultimately found that re-installation really means having to back-up your data and then reformatting the OS disk(s). I decided to proceed down this path because it also gave me an opportunity to move from ext3 to ext4.

3. Grub problems

Package copying went smoothly, but on the first reboot I just got the dreaded underscore from the boot loader.

Because I had to do this on FC6, I spend some hours thrashing around thinking I had to add the software RAID drivers to the initrd file. I was confused by the fact that mkinitrd was no longer a command.

Some extensive Googling later (luckly I had another computer, because my main system was now dead), I found I had to boot into rescue mode and issue the following Grub commands

Code:

root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)

I also did this on the RAID mirror so that I could still boot if disk 1 died:

Code:

root (hd1,0)
setup (hd1)

4. Nvidia drivers

I was now running Fedora 12! Now to recover my preferred environment.

The default Nvidia X11 driver (nouveau) does not allow you to run a separate X-server on each monitor. This allows me to have two independent sets of virtual desktops. So I had to install the driver from Nvidia.com.

Initially I tried the method I used on Fedora 6: Download the binary (.run) installer file, and run it as root outside of X (in runlevel 3). The kernel module compiled OK, but would not install. I found out that this was because the nouveau driver was conflicting, but it was impossible to rmmod it.

I tried removing the nouveau package, but I got a system hang next time I booted, and it took me some time to work out how to edit the grub kernel line to add the "3" parameter that allowed me to boot into runlevel 3 and re-install the nouveau package. Do not remove the nouveau package!

.
One final problem I had was that, unlike Fedora 6, the "Display" Gnome preferences wouldn't allow you to set-up the monitors under the proprietary Nvidia driver, including monitor rotation. I had to use the "nVidia Display Settings" tool (took me a while to find this in Applications -> System tools) to set-up the monitor modes, and then manually edit the xorg.conf file to add the proper monitor rotation option.

5. Skype

I installed the skype-2.1.0.47-fc10.i586.rpm package from skype.com, but it would not run. This was because it required some 32-bit libraries that weren't properly set as prerequisites. I had to keep running skype from the command line to see what library it couldn't find, determine the associated RPM, and "yum install" each.